Sergio Rajsbaum: Specifying Concurrent Problems: Beyond Linearizability and up to Tasks
Friday, September 30, 2016 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Location:
32-G631
Speaker:
Sergio Rajsbaum
Biography:
UNAM
Seminar group:
Tasks and objects are two predominant ways of specifying distributed problems. A task specifies for each set of processes (which may run concurrently) the valid outputs of the processes. An object specifies the outputs the object may produce when it is accessed sequentially. Each one requires its own implementation notion, to tell when an execution satisfies the specification. For objects linearizability is commonly used, while for tasks implementation notions are less explored.
Sequential specifications are very convenient, especially important is the locality property of linearizability, which states that linearizable objects compose for free into a linearizable object. However, most well-known tasks have no sequential specification. Also, tasks have no clear locality property.
The talk introduces the notion of interval-sequential object. The corresponding implementation notion of interval-linearizability generalizes linearizability. Interval-linearizability allows to specify any task. However, there are sequential one-shot objects that cannot be expressed as tasks, under the simplest interpretation of a task. A natural extension of the notion of a task is expressive enough to specify any interval-sequential object.
Joint work with Armando Castañeda and Michel Raynal presented in DISC2015.